Duck and cover. This was the gloves-off, throw-it-in-your-face edition of “Mad Men.”
Our master manipulator, Don Draper, finds himself in the very unfamiliar position of being pushed around and jerked around by seemingly everyone he comes into contact with — from Conrad Hilton to Sally’s school teacher to the sleazy hitchhikers he picks up on the lonesome road to nowheresville.
The episode titled “Seven Twenty Three” ends with the ultimate indignity for “Mad Men’s” man of mystery. Bert Cooper puts aside his crazy old codger routine to bend Don to his will by using Kryptonite — the knowledge that Don Draper isn’t who he says he is at all. A lot of old demons come back to haunt Don in this episode — and you get the feeling that the witching hour isn’t over for him, not by a long shot. The solar eclipse motif had obvious symbolism in an episode in which Don’s mental health seems to be spiraling out of control, again.
Don was the white-hot center of this riveting hour, but we also got some heavy duty material for Peggy and Betty. This episode was beautifully written — noticeably good even by “Mad Men” standards — by Andre Jacquemetton, Maria Jacquemetton and Matthew Weiner and directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer. There wasn’t a bad line in it, as far as I’m concerned, and the plot development seemed to gallop along, even though we don’t really know everything nor where things will end up. (We do know one thing — the escalation of the Vietnam war is definitely looming as a transformative and traumatic event for American culture. We know, unfortunately, how that storyline ends.)
“When it comes right down to it, who’s really signing this contract anyway,” Bert Cooper tells Don with a malevolent grin. Oh cut him to the quick, Bert. Jon Hamm is incredible in registering the agony of this moment for Don with barely a word. It seems as if Don made himself forget that way back in season one Pete Campbell picked up a few threads of the Don Draper/Dick Whitman subterfuge and tried to butter his own bread by outing Don to Bert.
